Pushed to the Edge: Investigation into Ukrainian Construction Workers Operating in London

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Abstract

In this article the nature of self-employment of illegal and legal Ukrainian migrants operating in the construction sector in UK is examined. The key aim of this article is to contribute to the discussion on the unexpected ways in which this new migrant community incorporates their self-employment activity, by explaining the patterns of illegality, intertwined with informality that has not been picked up by the extant literature. The approach in this article contrasts the prevailing view in the literature of the illegal migrant worker as “victim or villain”, recently criticised by Anderson and Ruhs (2010). The findings indicate that instead these illegal migrants operate in the labour market in ways similar to non-migrant regular self-employed individuals, and see their illegality as a process rather than final state. The sample of twenty illegal and legal Ukrainian self-employed workers was studied using mixed embeddedness approach for analysing self-employment among ethnic migrants.